Cheever's 2025 book,
When All the Men Wore Hats (
Farrar, Straus and Giroux), investigates the roots of her father's stories, the relationship between truth and fiction, and the secret lives that lie behind the page. Advance reviews have called it "an eloquent and fully immersive portrait of a renowned author" and "remarkable... sui generis... [an] illuminating book." Cheever's book
Drinking in America: Our Secret History was published in 2015. The book chronicles how alcohol has influenced the history of the United States. Her other books include
My Name is Bill - Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, a biography of
Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder
Bill Wilson;
Home Before Dark, a memoir about her father, novelist
John Cheever;
Treetops: A Memoir; and five novels:
Looking for Work, A Handsome Man, The Cage, Doctors and Women, and
Elizabeth Cole. Her essay "Baby Battle," in which she describes immersion in early motherhood and subsequent phases of letting go of her primary identity as a mother, was included in the 2006 anthology
Mommy Wars by
Leslie Morgan Steiner. Her most recent biography,
E.E. Cummings: A Life was reviewed in
The New York Times,
The New Yorker, and was selected as one of the best books of 2015 by
The Economist ("With boundless new detail gathered through meticulous research, Susan Cheever succeeds where most other biographers have failed....") and
The San Francisco Chronicle. Cheever is the author of
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, published in December 2006. Cheever was a
Guggenheim Fellow in 1983. She graduated from
Brown University in 1965 and studied American Literature at
New York University. She is also a member of the Corporation of Yaddo and serves on the Author's Guild Council. In addition to working on her books, she teaches in the
Bennington College M.F.A. program and at
The New School. Cheever is the author of
Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, which was published in 2008. ==Awards and honors==